The newest additions to the idleguy.com Library are a bit of a departure from the usual classics and deeper tomes that are usually promoted. Being summer, it was decided that some easier reading would be preferred, if only to take readers' minds off the turmoil and endless gaslighting of the day.
Three of these are strictly humor. The other three are included in the idleguy.com summer reading list.
Enjoy!
This is a fictional story of a teenager who accedentally torched the home of Emily Dickinson, spent 10 years in prison, and, upon his release, is accused of committing the same crime at the homes of other famous authors.
The plot twists around arso and catching the real criminal in a myriad of manners.
Pratchett's books have always been about character, with plot taking a back seat, and Going Postal is no exception. Our Hero is Moist von Lipwig, a conman who is hanged as the book opens for a long list of inventive and profitable crimes.
And then, as Pratchett puts it, an angel appears unto him.
Notes from Woody Allen's early days as a script-writer and movie-maker. This was hilariously funny when it was first published and retains the flavor and color of the 1970s in its witty, rambling way that Allen captured so briliantly.
The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.
Wildly funny and entertaining.
Brave New World is a dystopian novel written in 1931 by English author Aldous Huxley, and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State of genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a utopian society that goes challenged only by a single outsider.
The implications for today's world from Huxley's imagined future are profound.
The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway's first big novel, and immediately established him as one of the great prose stylists, and one of the preeminent writers of his time. It is also the book that encapsulates the angst of the post-World War I generation, known as the Lost Generation. This poignantly beautiful story of a group of American and English expatriates in Paris on an excursion to Pamplona represents a dramatic step forward for Hemingway's evolving style.
Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes in an age of moral bankrupcy, spiritual dissolution, unrequited love, and vanishing illusions.
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke (2008)
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett (2004)
Without Feathers by Woody Allen (1974)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1931)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
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SUMMER READING LIST
For those of you who managed to make it through high school by copying Cliff Notes or the book reviews of an older brother or sister and didn't bother to read the books on the - usually suggested but often mandatory - summer reading lists, here's your chance to make amends.
The following were probably on somebody's sumemr reading list, somewhere, and if you haven't read any of these, shame. If you've read all of them, you're a scholar!
These are only suggestions, and these books can be found in libraries, book stores (they still exist, don't they?), or online in pdf or other suitable forms. Ebay is also a good place to find these titles, if you prefer leafing along, old-school style. Three of them have been chosen for this month's featured books, available in PDF form in the idleguy.com library.
Reading any one of these books will no doubt make you a better person. Reading three or more may influence your life in dramatic and unexpected manners.
Good luck, and good reading. Here's the list:
The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Joseph Conrad
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / Dubliners, James Joyce
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
V, Thomas Pynchon
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
1984, George Orwell
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